Cyber attack on the airplane and Healthcare servers? Our networks are down and they have never been down this long. If you need lifesaving imaging right now you're in trouble.
https://abc13.com/post/coast-guard-rescues-oklahoma-couple-went-missing-scuba-diving-texas/15105162/ Open Water was a pretty good movie...such a f'ed up story
Work friend of mine sent a pic of smoke coming up towards his house in Colorado a little south of Denver. @rimrocker any thoughts? Also, I find your wildfire threads immensely informative and educational, would love it if you kept them going.
I assume this is the Quarry Fire near Littleton/Columbine. One thing that has happened over the last 15-20 years is that we have redefined the scale of fires. What was once thought of as a big fire barely registers these days--7,500 acres used to be big, now 100,000+ acres are routine. Our "Wow, look at that!" has moved from fire growth of a 1,500 acres a day to growth of 50,000 or more. Of course, that only applies to firefighters. For the people affected by a fire, even a 10 acre fire is a big deal. With that caveat, on first impression this appears to be a fire lower down on the complexity scale. Right now, it's classified as a Type 3 fire, with Type 2 and Type 1 fires being larger/more complex. A Type 3 fire means that it will take multiple days to contain the fire to our standard, but is not expected to increase dramatically in complexity. A few hours ago, it was about 350 acres with little overnight growth from yesterday. The vegetation appears to be in that Front Range transition zone with alternating fingers of shrub and timber, meaning the heavy fuels are not continuous and mainly on the shaded, wetter north sides of ridges. Looking at Google Maps 3D, the fire has to go downhill to spread much more, which gives firefighters a good chance to catch it. Also, because it is close to developed areas, they will have a number of aerial resources available. That said, the lack of crew availability nationwide may hamper suppression efforts and winds trump everything when it comes to fire spread. I haven't looked at the weather forecast--but I would still guess they keep this bottled up and well under 1,000 acres (depending on how much they need to burn out).
Looks like they have decent dozer line around the north and east flanks and are expecting favorable weather conditions over the next couple of days.
An ‘Unidentified Seismic Object’ Shook Earth for Nine Days—Now We Know What It Was Scientists have traced a baffling monotonous planetary hum that lasted for nine days back to a glacier in Greenland BY STEPHEN HICKS, KRISTIAN SVENNEVIG & THE CONVERSATION US Dickson Fjord before (August 2023) (left) and after (September 2023) (right) the landslide. Søren Rysgaard (left); Danish Army (right) The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Earthquake scientists detected an unusual signal on monitoring stations used to detect seismic activity during September 2023. We saw it on sensors everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica. We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded. Instead of the frequency-rich rumble typical of earthquakes, this was a monotonous hum, containing only a single vibration frequency. Even more puzzling was that the signal kept going for nine days. Initially classified as a “USO” – an unidentified seismic object – the source of the signal was eventually traced back to a massive landslide in Greenland’s remote Dickson Fjord. A staggering volume of rock and ice, enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, plunged into the fjord, triggering a 200-metre-high mega-tsunami and a phenomenon known as a seiche: a wave in the icy fjord that continued to slosh back and forth, some 10,000 times over nine days. To put the tsunami in context, that 200-metre wave was double the height of the tower that houses Big Ben in London and many times higher than anything recorded after massive undersea earthquakes in Indonesia in 2004 (the Boxing Day tsunami) or Japan in 2011 (the tsunami which hit Fukushima nuclear plant). It was perhaps the tallest wave anywhere on Earth since 1980. Pre- (30 minutes before) and post-landslide (7 minutes after) Planet Labs satellite images. Planet Labs (CC BY-SA 4.0) Our discovery, now published in the journal Science, relied on collaboration with 66 other scientists from 40 institutions across 15 countries. Much like an air crash investigation, solving this mystery required putting many diverse pieces of evidence together, from a treasure trove of seismic data, to satellite imagery, in-fjord water level monitors, and detailed simulations of how the tsunami wave evolved. This all highlighted a catastrophic, cascading chain of events, from decades to seconds before the collapse. The landslide travelled down a very steep glacier in a narrow gully before plunging into a narrow, confined fjord. Ultimately though it was decades of global heating that had thinned the glacier by several tens of meters, meaning that the mountain towering above it could no longer be held up. UNCHARTED WATERS But beyond the weirdness of this scientific marvel, this event underscores a deeper and more unsettling truth: climate change is reshaping our planet and our scientific methods in ways we are only beginning to understand. It is a stark reminder that we are navigating uncharted waters. Just a year ago, the idea that a seiche could persist for nine days would have been dismissed as absurd. Similarly, a century ago, the notion that warming could destabilise slopes in the Arctic, leading to massive landslides and tsunamis happening almost yearly, would have been considered far-fetched. Yet, these once-unthinkable events are now becoming our new reality. As we move deeper into this new era, we can expect to witness more phenomena that defy our previous understanding, simply because our experience does not encompass the extreme conditions we are now encountering. We found a nine-day wave that previously no one could imagine could exist. Before and after the landslide and tsunami. Søren Rysgaard (left); Danish Army (right) Traditionally, discussions about climate change have focused on us looking upwards and outwards to the atmosphere and to the oceans with shifting weather patterns, and rising sea levels. But Dickson Fjord forces us to look downward, to the very crust beneath our feet. For perhaps the first time, climate change has triggered a seismic event with global implications. The landslide in Greenland sent vibrations through the Earth, shaking the planet and generating seismic waves that travelled all around the globe, within an hour of the event. No piece of ground beneath our feet was immune to these vibrations, metaphorically opening up fissures in our understanding of these events. THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN Although landslide-tsunamis have been recorded before, the one in September 2023 was the first ever seen in east Greenland, an area that had appeared immune to these catastrophic climate change induced events. This certainly won’t be the last such landslide-megatsunami. As permafrost on steep slopes continues to warm and glaciers continue to thin we can expect these events to happen more often and on an even bigger scale across the world’s polar and mountainous regions. Recently identified unstable slopes in west Greenland and in Alaska are clear examples of looming disasters. As we confront these extreme and unexpected events, it is becoming clear that our existing scientific methods and toolkits may need to be fully equipped to deal with them. We had no standard workflow to analyse 2023 Greenland event. We also must adopt a new mindset because our current understanding is shaped by a now near-extinct, previously stable climate. As we continue to alter our planet’s climate, we must be prepared for unexpected phenomena that challenge our current understanding and demand new ways of thinking. The ground beneath us is shaking, both literally and figuratively. While the scientific community must adapt and pave the way for informed decisions, it’s up to decision-makers to act.
